Xamarin development

Building best-in-class cross-platform apps with Microsoft Xamarin.

Cross-platform app development solutions with Microsoft Xamarin

Exceptional cross-platform solutions require successfully merging a mobile strategy with the characteristics of top native apps, like fast performance, native UIs, and native access, as well as the efficiency advantages code sharing delivers.
Cross-platform development tools play an important role in the mobile ecosystem. Our partnership with Xamarin allows us to combine the award-winning UX design and development skills of our team with Xamarin’s platform to deliver clients high-quality cross-platform apps on an accelerated timeline. In short, WillowTree designs and develops Xamarin applications that mimic truly native experiences.

Why Xamarin?

There are many mobile cross-platform tools to choose from. How do they compare and why did we choose to support Xamarin over Phonegap, Cordova, Kony, Titanium, and others?

Fully Native: Xamarin is one of very few cross-platform mobile development tools that is fully native (i.e. we are utilizing the platform’s native UIs and APIs, not HTML or a mix of HTML/native as with many other platforms). That also means we get a significant mobile performance improvement as the apps run at native speed. When necessary, Xamarin’s tools also allow us to easily do work in native code, so we are never constrained if we run into a limitation of the platform.

Broad Community Support: The Xamarin tools are supported by Xamarin’s parent company, Microsoft. More importantly, the platform uses languages and tools supported by very large communities (C#, Visual Studio, Mono).

Diverse Third Party Libraries: The largest risk of any cross-platform tool is how many third-party libraries and SDKs support it. We use anywhere from ten to thirty third-party libraries or SDKs on most of the apps we build. If those were not supported by Xamarin, any gains we get from working with a cross-platform tool would be more than outweighed by having to custom code components that are already widely available. In the event Xamarin does not support a library we need, we can create bindings to 3rd party libraries and don’t have to wait for a separate 3rd party implementation.